Twelve

She was sitting in a chair with her back to me, looking out that window. The Persian was on her lap. I remember wondering crazily if a ghost could feel the ghost-weight of a ghost-cat, since I hadn’t felt a thing when the Persian jumped up on my bed. Because there wasn’t any more question about the woman than the cat—I could see the window through her, and the chestnut tree through the window; and when she put the cat down and stood up to face me, I saw that her hair and skin and gown were all the same color, a kind of pearl-gray, but with a light in it, the way rain clouds can look when the sky’s almost purple behind them. She said, “Jennifer. Aye, I thought it would be you to find me.”

I’d expected her voice would be as tiny as the Persian’s meow, but actually it was clear as could be. Low and soft, but absolutely clear, with just a bit of what sounded almost like a Southern drawl. I couldn’t answer her. I just stood there.

She smiled at me, and I guess that has to be when I fell in love with her. There was so much loneliness in that smile, but there was amusement, too, and understanding. She wasn’t anything more than understanding; she was held together by memories of understanding, memories of laughter. No, of course I didn’t know all that then. I didn’t know anything, except that my life was never going to be the same again. And that was fine with me.

“I am Tamsin Willoughby,” she said. With the chair behind her, I could see her better as she moved toward me. She wasn’t tall— my height, maybe an inch more—and I couldn’t have said much about her hair or her eyes (except that they were as delicately slanted as the Persian’s), because everything was that glimmering gray color. And I can’t say—even now—whether she was beautiful or not. Her face was a little round, and her mouth was probably too wide, with maybe a bit too much chin below it. But I couldn’t stop looking at her, and I couldn’t speak, not for the longest while. Tamsin just waited, never looking impatient, never looking as though she was patiently being patient. Time didn’t mean anything to Tamsin—that was the first thing I ever really learned about her.

And the first thing I ever said to her, when I could talk, was, “How do you know my name?”

She laughed then, in a funny, breathless sort of way, like a child who’s been running for no reason, just to run. “La, indeed”—she really did say that, la—“and how should I not know it, with you and your family abounding this way and that, filling the air with all your sweet riot—your jests, your labors, your songs, and your quarrels?” She pretended to count on her fingers. “Your father is Evan, your mother Sal, your brothers Anthony and Julian. As to Graymalkin here, I confess myself witling.”

“His name’s Mister Cat,” I said. Graymalkin’s out of Macbeth, which we had at Gaynor, in Introduction to Drama, so I knew. “And Evan and Tony and Julian aren’t my family.” I’d never said it just like that, not even to Sally when I was really pissed. I said, “They’re my step-family, sort of.”

Close to, I could see that the grayness had a slow pulse to it— clearer… dimmer… clearer… dimmer—like a heartbeat. Tamsin was looking at me altogether too shrewdly, considering she was dead and we’d just met. But all she said was, “You’re not of Dorset—no, nor of England neither, I think. You’ll be from the Colonies.”

“The Colonies,” I said. “Oh. Right. The Colonies. America, yes. There was a revolution. We’re an independent country now. I guess you wouldn’t know.”

Her hair was a mass of corkscrew curls, drawn up on top and spilling down over her right shoulder. It didn’t move when she shook her head. She said, “This house has not always stood empty, Mistress Jennifer—there have been a mort of other voices than yours passing my door, crying the news below my window. Well I know that Romish James is departed, and the Hanovers come long since, and those weighty men who visited my father by night as surely dust as I. Colonies gained and lost, powers arisen and fallen away, alliances sworn, alliances broken, poor Dorset long losel as a Jacobus… What may be the year now, child?”

I told her. It looked to me as though she swayed for a moment, but maybe that was just that come-and-go pulsation of the grayness. “So late? So late, and here am I still, when I should be as gone as James and… and Edric Davies, and him.” I hardly heard the last few words, they came out in such a whisper. “Art certain, Mistress Jennifer?”

“I’m certain,” I said. “And please, I wish you wouldn’t call me Jennifer. I’m Jenny—no mistress about it. Everyone calls me Jenny.”

Tamsin Willoughby smiled a second time, and everything in me just dissolved into marshmallows and Silly Putty. I have never been one of those girls who’s always getting huge crushes on older girls, but Tamsin… It wasn’t that she was so pretty—Meena’s way prettier, if you want to measure these things. Maybe it was just the plain fact of her being a ghost, and smiling at me across three hundred years—I can’t say it wasn’t. But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me—me, Jenny Gluckstein—like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing—recognition is something else.

Tamsin said, “Jenny, then. You must remind me when I forget— and I will forget, because that is what I do, that is all I am. You would think—would you not?—that after so many, many years, surely there would be naught left me to forget, who’d seen but twenty summers when I… when I stopped.” She always used that word. “Yet the voices under the window do tell me names, speak of changes and wonders—teach me songs, even—and I learn these things for a little, then, swiftly forget them, too. As I forget why I must be here at all.”

Writing the words down the way she spoke them, it looks pitiable somehow, as though she were asking for sympathy. But that wasn’t the way they sounded, not for a minute, and it wasn’t in the way she carried herself, nor the way she looked at me. The Persian cat was rubbing against her foot, and that was weird: one see-through impossibility comforting itself by making contact with another. I asked, “Who’s she? My cat’s practically left home because of her.”

Tamsin really laughed then, and it sounded like rainwater plinking off leaves and flowers after the storm’s gone by. “Her name is Miss Sophia Brown. I could never forget that, as long as we have been together. She’s all grand hogen-mogen one minute and a flirting flibbergib the next, but we fadge along pretty smartly—at least until your fine black gentleman presented himself. I’ve never known her gloat so upon a lover.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Mister Cat’s got a girlfriend back home, but I think she was just using him. The thing is, he’s alive, and your Sophia Brown… I don’t know. I wouldn’t exactly say they had much of a future.”

“La, what odds makes that to a cat?” Miss Sophia Brown and Mister Cat were standing nose to nose, both of them purring in complete satisfaction with their own taste in pussycats. As we watched, Mister Cat began washing Miss Sophia Brown’s face, and if there wasn’t anything actually there to be washed, or held still with a paw behind her right ear, he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if ghost-cats got hairballs. I decided I wouldn’t wonder about that.

Tamsin said, very quietly, “Cats have no cares for who’s quick, who’s… stopped. Shall we be like them?”

We looked at each other. I said, “You smell like vanilla.”

Tamsin’s eyebrows went up, but one corner of her mouth twitched just a bit. It seemed to me that she was looking maybe a bit less transparent—I could even see something like color in her face, and in the long, close-waisted gown she was wearing, or dreaming she was wearing. “I smelled you,” I said. “When I was with Julian.”